Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, data, video and the like, and deployments are likely to increase with introduction of new data oriented systems such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. Wireless communications systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems and other orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communication system can simultaneously support communication for multiple wireless terminals (also know as user equipments (UEs), or access terminals (ATs)). Each terminal communicates with one or more base stations (also know as access points (APs), EnodeBs or eNBs) via transmissions on forward and reverse links. The forward link (also referred to as a downlink or DL) refers to the communication link from the base stations to the terminals, and the reverse link (also referred to as an uplink or UL) refers to the communication link from the terminals to the base stations. These communication links may be established via a single-in-single-out, single-in-multiple out, multiple-in-single-out or a multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) system.
A MIMO system employs multiple (NT) transmit antennas and multiple (NR) receive antennas for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the NT transmit and NR receive antennas may be decomposed into NS independent channels, which are also referred to as spatial channels. Generally, each of the NS independent channels corresponds to a dimension. The MIMO system can provide improved performance (e.g., higher throughput and/or greater reliability) if the additional dimensionalities created by the multiple transmit and receive antennas are utilized. A MIMO system also supports time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD) systems. In a TDD system, the forward and reverse link transmissions are on the same frequency region so that the reciprocity principle allows estimation of the forward link channel from the reverse link channel. This enables an access point to extract transmit beam-forming gain on the forward link when multiple antennas are available at the access point.
Base station nodes, sometimes referred to as eNBs, have different capabilities for deployment in a network. This includes transmission power classes, access restriction, and so forth. In one aspect, heterogeneous network characteristics create wireless coverage dead spots (e.g., Donut coverage hole). This may cause severe inter-cell interference requiring undesirable user equipment cell association. In general, heterogeneous network characteristics require deep penetration of physical channels which may cause unwanted interference between nodes and equipment on the respective network.
Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is an extension to the Internet Protocol (IP) and to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and is defined in RFC 3168 (2001). ECN allows end-to-end notification of network congestion dropping packets, and is an optional feature that is only used when both endpoints support it and are willing to use it. ECN is only effective when supported by the underlying network. Traditionally, TCP/IP networks signal congestion by dropping packets. However, when ECN is successfully negotiated, an ECN-aware router may set a mark in the IP header instead of dropping a packet in order to signal impending congestion. The receiver of the packet echoes the congestion indication to the sender, which must react as though a packet was dropped. Some outdated or buggy network equipment may drop packets with ECN bits set, rather than ignoring the bits.
ECN functionality can be used to perform end-to-end rate adaptation between user equipment or devices (UEs) in a wireless network. However, if the transport network does not properly support ECN, the terminals will have to disable ECN and the UEs cannot perform rate adaptation. Even if an operator ensures that its network properly supports ECN, it cannot guarantee that another operator will do the same for their network. As a result, calls between UEs in different operator networks cannot be guaranteed to support rate adaptation using ECN.
One solution is to require that all operator networks and UEs support ECN. One problem with this approach is that it requires significant work for the operators to ensure that their network is ECN-transparent and not all operators are interested in this feature. Another solution is to have the UEs constantly probe the transport path to determine if it is ECN-transparent. If it is not, the UEs disable the ECN and rate adaptation function. Therefore this does not ensure ECN/rate adaptation for all calls, and has the additional complexity burden of requiring UEs to constantly probe and monitor the transport path